mutating the signature

The new issue of Mutating the Signature is now underway. We were planning on stepping away from the journal because of health and personal reasons, but we wanted Jenny and Deb to have the chance to write, edit and curate their issue, which has been in the planning stages for months. Jenny and Deb have been incredibly gracious and generous in their understanding of our situation, and we in turn want to be as supportive of them and their work as possible.

Their issue theme is Daylighting the Rabbit Hole, and we can’t wait to find out what that means as the issue unfolds. Here is some information about the issue’s curators:

This Jenny Chu, not to be confused with the many other Jenny Chus listed on Google search, lives in Portland, Ore. Her surroundings and the people in her life allow her to be the writer she is and her creativity is indebted to them. Deb introduced Jenny to the Read Write Poem website where Jenny met Dana and Nathan for the first time at a Read Write Poem gathering at a little restaurant called The Old Wives Tale. They all played with Dana’s fuzzy scarf. Deb has introduced Jenny to many things poetry: Read Write Poem, Mutating the Signature, Dana and Nathan, as well as the notion that form, in poetry, is an incredibly malleable medium in which anything is possible. Jenny has published two short stories, “The Separating Wall” (2007) and “chi nez  e mer’i ken” (2008).

Deb Scott lives in Portland, Ore., where she met Jenny Chu while in writing classes at Marylhurst University. (Jenny, I think you were in all my writing classes except Environmental Writing.) Deb met Dana while participating at Poetry Thursday and was part of The Poetry Collaborative (where she met Nathan). Deb blogs at Stoney Moss and is one of the directors at Read Write Poem. A few places have been kind enough to publish her words. You can find a list here, if you want to know more.

Tomorrow the process section of Mutating the Signature’s second issue gets underway. In case you missed our previous announcement, the second issue’s curators are Emily Van Duyne and W.F. Roby. Their theme is Ante/Anti.

Those of you who followed Project Verse — Dustin Brookshire’s online writing competition which Van Duyne and Roby both competed in — know you are in for a real experience treat ride with this issue. Both poets have mad writing skills, a willingness and desire to publicly write and share draft work, and a healthy competitive spirit (hence the “ante” part of their theme, as in “raising the ante”). This combination of attributes should make Mutating the Signature a perfect format for showcasing what this curatorial team can do, not only with completed material but also with their work in progress.

In case you missed their bios the first time around, here they are again:

Emily Van Duyne is a poet who lives just south of Atlantic City, N.J., where she is adjunct professor of writing at Atlantic Cape Community College. Her poems can be viewed at I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin. She looks forward to her inevitable besting of W.F. Roby in this argument in verse.

W.F. lives in Dallas, Texas, and works as a freelance writer. His poems have appeared at Umbrella, Stirring, The GW Review and others. His new one act play ForwardS just received its premiere at The Clusterfucks one act play festival in Lubbock, Texas. Other plays have been produced at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Ocala Civic Theater, Texas Tech University and in a kiddie pool out back of a Starbucks. When asked for a quote for this piece, he said, “I wish I could offer you a helping hand, really I do.”

Now let’s get to it. As of midnight tonight, we are handing the reins of this site over to Van Duyne and Roby. They will be free to use this space however they see fit as they publicly create content for their issue during the process section of Ante/Anti. Let’s all sit back and see what happens.

– Nathan Moore and Dana Guthrie Martin

We (finally) finished curating Untelling Stories, the first “test flight” issue of Mutating the Signature. The curated issue is now laid out and available in an electronic format.

Our test flight was designed so that we, as publishers of Mutating the Signature, could have the opportunity to act in the curatorial role before inviting guest curators to work on future issues. This means we now have practical, not just theoretical, experience regarding how the entire process works. We also hoped to model some of the ways in which future curators might work together on their own issues.

We feel good about what we accomplished during this issue, both in terms of processing and curating the material.

The final piece can be viewed or downloaded at issuu.com or as a PDF file. The issuu version is embedded above. (If you are reading this post on an RSS reader, you will have to click through to the site to see the embedded document.) Or, if you prefer, you can view or download our PDF version of the collection.

This curated issue represents the final version of the work we drafted here on the site from Oct. 7 to Nov. 18, 2009. Revising the work collaboratively, determining the order of the pieces and laying them out in an attractive manner were much more time-consuming than we had anticipated. But the entire process was also nothing short of a blast. We would not trade the experience for anything, not even the ugliest luggage in the airport or an entire suitcase museum.

We hoped to have audio files for some of our pieces available by now, but with Dana’s viral or bacterial infection turned lung infection turned sinus infection turned bronchitis, the audio files have been delayed. We’ll get to them as soon as she is feeling better.

For those who have not seen the process section of Untelling Stories, where all the rough drafts and process notes reside, you can check those posts out by clicking here.

– Nathan Moore and Dana Guthrie Martin